Climigration: Migration forced by climate change. (Climate + migration.)

Reporting for Reuters on the Indigenous Peoples’ Global Summit on Climate Change, Deborah Zabarenko wrote:

The summit is taking place about 500 miles from the Alaskan village of Newtok, where intensifying river flow and melting permafrost are forcing 320 residents to resettle on a higher site some 9 miles away in a new consequence of climate change, known as climigration.

According to Zabarenko, “Newtok is the first official Arctic casualty of climate change”; but, 26 other Alaskan villages are considered to be in “immediate danger.”


Despite the very real threat that climate change poses to a number of indigenous communities, the chair of the summit, Patricia Cochran, an Inupiat native from Nome, Alsaka, said: “We don’t want to be seen just as the powerless victims of climate change.”

“Our conference is really stirred by our wanting to become leaders … on climate change because we have the ability to bring information from our communities to the rest of the world,” Cochran said in a telephone interview from Anchorage.

Indigenous traditions are hardly static, she said, noting that native people have always adapted to their changing and often harsh environments.

For instance, Cochran said, Inuit people in Alaska are reverting to traditional dogsleds instead of modern snow machines as the icy region warms.

“People go out on their snow machines, fall through the ice and are never seen again,” she said. “But our sled dogs will tell you when the ice is not safe … and they’re a lot easier to feed than (to pay) the gas prices that we have, $10 a gallon in many of our villages.”

Ahead of the conference, UN Under-Secretary-General Konrad Osterwalder stated:

The clear voice of Indigenous Peoples needs to be heard by rest of the world community and their insights honoured in critically important climate change discussions now underway. When it comes to implementing mitigation and adaptation strategies, the world would gain greatly from proven ancient approaches built on profound respect for the Earth.

(Climigration is an increasingly serious global issue. For example, in the South Pacific, 3,000 Carteret Islanders are having to migrate to Papua-New Guinea as a consequence of rising sea-levels; and residents of Tuvalu, where the highest point is just 13 feet above sea level, are facing a similar threat. In Kenya, prolongued drought has forced many of the nomadic Turknana people into towns and relief camps. Indeed, it seems like that climigration will become more and more of a catalyst for migration and, as a consequence, conflict.)